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Saturday, September 01, 2012

Rachel's in swimmingarten

Not too far from our house is a community pool. And it's completely at our disposal. We've only gone a couple of times though because I don't have enough hands to take three non-swimming children swimming, especially since one can't even sit up yet. Taking two children was a piece of cake—you plop the toddler into a floaty and hold the baby, one arm still devoted to controlling the tot's floaty. How, though, do you safely manage two children in floaties while holding an infant? You can't possibly keep an arm on all three children at once. So you have to let one of them float solo—but what if that floaty flips over? How do you grab the now-drowning child without risking the safety of the other two?

Maybe I'm over-thinking this. But having worn the lifeguard hat I know how quickly a happy time at the pool can turn tragic. I've seen floaties flip over with babies inside them. It's scary.

So I took the girls swimming while Grandma was still here (leaving her at home with the baby). We went again on Thursday after school. This time Andrew sat on the deck with the baby while I went in the water with both of the girls. In theory he was supposed to study but in reality he dealt with a wee blow out, waded with Miriam in the kiddie pool (or cat pool, as she likes to call it), and got bit by mosquitoes.

To make the best use of the pool, though, what we really need is another swimmer in our family. Rachel was voted the most-likely candidate so while Benjamin and Miriam were napping this afternoon and Daddy was studying, Rachel and I headed to the pool for swimming lessons (courtesy of moi).

An hour later she was doing this:

She's making excellent progress. I'd really like her to be able to swim the width of the pool without stopping before I brave the water with her and two non-swimming babes. I don't think it will take her long, though, because she is absolutely determined to learn how to swim. She didn't want to leave when our hour was up and probably would have stayed until the pool closed.

As it is, we swam through sun and rain and while being bombarded by huge bumble bees (no joke).

2 comments:

Good job. Well, if you remember--which you won't because you weren't born yet--I never had only one child. I started out with two, and when I had my first baby I had three. So, how I handled three in the water was that I wore the front carrier (do you have the thin blue one that I had?) with David in it, so I still had two hands free, one for each child. I just had to make sure that I did not go in the water too deep, so that David's breathing apparatus was always above water.

I hit the same problem when I had the third child. We ended up buying puddle jumpers. They are coast guard approved and so much better than life jackets. I've always been a little against floaties because the child should just learn to swim right? Well that stopped when my 18 month old almost drowned because I was trying to calm my 3 year old. We love them and I can take one child at a time out of the floatie to work on swimming. Hopefully you guys can enjoy the pool.